Feb. 27, 2008—William F. Buckley Jr., the father of the modern American conservative movement in
America, died at age 82 of a heart attack in the study at his Stamford, Conn.,
home, after months of enduring emphysema, diabetes and the loss of his wife
Patricia.
I will leave to others to examine the multiple
contributions over a half-century of this columnist, National Review editor, television debater, candidate, and friend
even to people whose views he scorned. I don’t share the ideology of this
indefatigable literary politician, but
as someone vitally interested in history, I owe him more than the kind of
cursory treatment of his life and legacy that I could summon at this point.
No, because this blog is, by its essentially
essayistic form, personal, I prefer to focus on the aspect of his life with
extra resonance for me these last few weeks: how a son copes with the passing of
a father of strong, persistent faith.
Christopher Buckley attempted to make sense of his parents’ passing—and
his own complicated relationship with them—in his 2009 memoir about their final
year, Losing Mum and Pup. Few children have had parents as famous as
Bill and Pat, but more than a few suffering bereavement will identify with
Christopher’s tangled emotions on their legacy.
After their parents’ deaths, even children who loved
them will often wonder how they came to be so different from them. For all
their shared humor, love of sailing, and passion for the written words, the
differences were especially bothersome for Bill and Christopher. Each said,
wrote or did something frequently to peeve the other.
Religious faith proved a particular stumbling block
for the Buckleys. Although I am more captivated by Christopher’s contrarian
political principles and sharp satiric sense, I am more drawn to the Roman
Catholic Church that claimed Bill’s lifelong devotion.
“People die, God endures,” Bill wrote. That belief,
as fundamental to the Anglophile aristocrat as to my working-class Irish
father, sadly eluded Christopher. Religious skepticism, particularly the brand
favored by his friend, journalist Christopher Hitchens, was more the son’s
style.
But it is moving to see him struggle not to disappoint
his father by giving full vent to his feelings about atheism, a subject about
which Bill had (surprise!) powerful opinions. “I believe that the duel between Christianity
and atheism is the most important in the world,” Bill wrote in the 1951 polemic
that made him the enfant terrible of conservatism, God and Man at Yale.
In the end, it is profoundly moving to see
Christopher struggle not to disappoint his father by restraining his
opinions—and to cope ruefully with the ache left by his own lack of belief:
"That night, going to sleep, I looked out the
window and the thought invariably came, So, Pup, was it true, after all? Is
there a heaven? Are you in it? For all my doubts, I hoped he was. If he was,
then at least I stood some chance of being admitted on a technicality, with the
host of Firing Line up there arguing
my case. I doubt St. Peter was any match for him."
And, as I have been discovering firsthand the past
few weeks: “Once they’re both gone, your parents’ house instantly turns into a
museum.”
